B.C. New Democrat raves about Cuba's communist paradise

When last seen, B.C. New Democrat Jagrup Brar was making a long point about welfare rates in his province. The MLA from Surrey-Fleetwood spent a month last winter living on $610, the current welfare rate for a single, employable adult in B.C.

“I’ve not been able to buy enough food,” Mr. Brar complained one day in January, as he walked to a temporary new home in Vancouver’s squalid Downtown Eastside, a gaggle of reporters trailing behind him. “I’ve already lost eight or nine pounds.” Of course, Mr. Brar didn’t stick around. He returned to his MLA job, for which he was paid $102,138 last year, plus $25,918 for living and travel expenses.

Recently, he went to Cuba. Mr. Brar took his family to a resort in Varadero, a beach community that thousands of Canadian tourists visit every year. The Brars also went to Havana, where they enjoyed a boat cruise. And they toured a monument to Che Guevara. Mr. Brar returned from Cuba quite delighted. He delivered a glowing report of the place last week on Radio India, a Punjabi-language station based in Surrey.

Sure, Cubans may not “have as much right to free speech” as Canadians, and they “lack the freedom to travel outside the country,” which Mr. Brar ascribed only to their relative poverty. “The business community there as a percentage, compared to ours, is quite low,” conceded Mr. Brar, the NDP’s small business critic. But these were niggling concerns, because “the gap between the rich and poor does not exist.”

This was too good to ignore. The ruling Liberals pounced. “Jagrup Brar expressed over-the-top admiration for nanny state communist Cuba,” fumed Kootenay East MLA Bill Bennett, in a statement his party released Monday. “Will [B.C. NDP leader Adrian] Dix distance himself from his communist-infatuated MLA?…In this case, Jagrup may well have given us a glimpse into the secret desires of the B.C. NDP Caucus.”

A caucus, British Columbians hardly need reminding, that will likely form part of a new NDP government after May 14, 2013, when the next provincial election is scheduled. The NDP has for months enjoyed a commanding lead in voter-intention and opinion polls, much to the chagrin of right-leaning B.C. voters, many of whom can no longer support the Liberals and have migrated to a third party, the B.C. Conservatives. A Liberal-Conservative vote split would almost guarantee an NDP victory in 2013.

On Wednesday, B.C. finance minister Kevin Falcon announced his resignation from cabinet, effective immediately. He will not seek re-election next year. A scrappy politician with a reputation as a strong fiscal conservative, Mr. Falcon finished second to Christy Clark in the Liberal party’s 2011 leadership contest. He’s the highest-profile government member to bail from cabinet. Rumours have swirled around the province’s brainy education minister, George Abbott, who came third in the leadership race. He could be the next big name to fall.

Mr. Bennett, on the other hand, will definitely run again; he made public his intentions just last week. That may not be a good thing for B.C. Liberals; he’s a notorious hot head who was turfed from caucus a few years ago after intemperate attack on former Liberal leader Gordon Campbell, whom he described as a verbally abusive bully. Mr. Campbell once got so angry with him, he recalled, that “he got in my face, he actually spit in my face. He is not a nice man.”

Now he’s being mocked for desperate, hyperbolic “red-baiting.” This, just as Ms. Clark announced her plans for another trip to China.

This is B.C. It gets stranger. What, precisely, did Mr. Brar tell his radio interviewer? The National Post asked the two-term MLA for an interview; the request was turned down by NDP officials in Victoria. A caucus colleague was assigned to do the talking for him.

The Liberals provided a transcript of his Radio India interview, translated from the Punjabi. According to the transcript, Mr. Brar told his radio interviewer that in Cuba, “the gap between rich and poor is not there or very minimal. Nor is there an individual who doesn’t have a place to sleep or food to eat. Nor is there a child who goes to bed hungry.”

He went on at length about Cuba’s “free” education system, and its peerless “free” public health care network, where, he claimed, doctors are available at any hour and will dispense “any medication you need.”

There is no crime in Cuba, declared Mr. Brar. At least, he didn’t see any. And that’s what his Cuban “guide” said.

“He told me that the ‘rat race’ that exists in our society doesn’t take place there. He said they enjoy their lives and live their lives to the fullest. That’s the type of life there,” said Mr. Brar. “People roam free in the streets whether in the cities or the villages. I witnessed young women in the streets catching rides or waiting for the bus.”

Everything is spic and span in communist Cuba. “The villages are very clean,” Mr. Brar told his radio host, “because in the villages they have removed all of the cattle and livestock and moved them to all of the outlying farms…They have storms but there is no dirt or debris to be found anywhere.”

A socialist’s paradise, in other words. Free of crime, free of dirt, free of worry, free of wandering cattle, free of critical thinking. Where “everyone is dressed the same.” Coming soon, to British Columbia? Mr. Falcon, please reconsider.